Saskia Huc-Hepher
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Conclusion
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The Conclusion reflects on the book as a whole and considers how major changes to the London diasporic space, instigated by the post-2016 political landscape, renders it a work of contemporary history as much as ethnography. It underscores the distinctiveness of the migrant group examined and the book’s theoretical contribution to the field of migration studies. The Conclusion reminds readers how participants’ narratives exposed powerful, if latent, ideological and affective forces, and how their aspirations were projected onto the diasporic space so that the homeland, particularly Paris, emerged as comparatively hostile, unsafe, judgemental and segregated, whereas London was apprehended as open, secure, liberated and (super)diverse. This normative evaluation process, it contends, produced a sense of embeddedness and diasporic belonging in pre-EU-referendum London. The chapter also discusses the meanings garnered from the book’s blended ethnographic methodology arguing that online diasporic spaces function as microcosms for the wider London-French experience and that cultural and linguistic situatedness ultimately constrains hybridisation. It recommends several future areas of enquiry, including those related to Brexit, to London-French sub-communities and/or to new digital methodologies, again drawing on archived web material. To finish, it returns to the words of the migrants’ themselves and provides a range of responses to the ‘London-in-a-nutshell’ interview question, which sums up the overall appeal of London as a migratory destination at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

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French London

A blended ethnography of a migrant city

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